Inside the Star

New ridings give Tories an edge

The federal Conservatives stand to be the big winners when 30 new ridings are added to the map for the next election, according to a study that puts the 2011 results into the proposed boundaries for the 2015 vote.

OTTAWA—The federal Conservatives stand to be the big winners when 30 new ridings are added to the map for the next election, according to a study that puts the 2011 results into the proposed boundaries for the 2015 vote.

The Conservatives’ current majority would leap to 191 seats in the next 338-member Parliament — compared to 166 out of 308 they won in 2011 — if the votes from the last election were distributed along the proposed new boundary lines, according to a detailed poll-by-poll analysis by the firm Pollmaps.ca.

Ontario’s burgeoning population, especially in the GTA suburbs, would give the Conservatives those big gains, the breakdown shows.

The other opposition parties wouldn’t fare as well if their 2011 votes were realigned under the new boundaries, the Pollmaps analysis reveals. The New Democrats would get just eight more seats overall than they received in 2011, while the Liberals would lose two and the Bloc Quebecois would lose one.

Mitch Wexler is head of Pollmaps.ca, which supplies political parties, mainly Conservatives, with detailed demographic analyses of ridings across Canada. He used his poll-by-poll mapping system to reshuffle the last two elections’ results into the 338-ridings proposed for the next election.

“There is no doubt that the Conservatives did very well where the population is growing, in Alberta and the 905 (telephone area code in Ontario) in particular,” he said. “But this process tends to favour the party with the most seats, no matter who is in power. In Quebec, for example, the NDP would increase five seats in the region where they are dominant (and where the Bloc Québécois and the Conservatives lose one each).”

Canada’s electorate is a volatile one, and no party assumes that the votes it received in the last election are the same votes it will receive the next time around.

The election ridings are being redrawn to reflect the population growth in pockets across Canada. Ontario is due to get 15 new ridings, British Columbia and Alberta will get six each and Quebec three under the electoral map legislation.

It’s a work in progress, with the proposed ridings only drafted by non-partisan, provincial commissions over the past few months. Hearings are scheduled in the coming months to reshape the Commons representation according to Canada’s shifting demographics.

So the Pollmaps study isn’t a prediction of future election results, but a revealing glimpse into which parties stand to benefit from the population growth in expanding areas of Canada, primarily suburban ones.

“Parties cannot take these perceived gains for granted because the seats can flip just as easily when voters decide on a change,” says Wexler, who has also headed up local Conservative campaigns in Ontario at the federal and provincial level. “They will need to work hard to earn them.”

The Conservatives, who have designed their political appeal around suburban voters, especially in Ontario, would get the biggest payoff in that province under the new boundaries if their current support holds.

If the 2011 election results in Ontario were distributed among the proposed new boundaries, the Conservatives would get 13 more seats, the Pollmaps analysis found, mostly in suburban enclaves such as the proposed ridings of Mississauga Centre and Brampton Centre.

The New Democrats would get two new MPs in Ontario if the 2011 votes are put into the 2015 map, benefiting from the boundaries proposed in the Scarborough area and around Hamilton.

The Liberals, who used to dominate the province, wouldn’t see a change in their overall numerical fates, though at the ground level, the shift is interesting.

The new riding of Mount Pleasant, for instance, which is due to be created out of pieces of the existing ridings of Don Valley West, St. Paul’s and Toronto Centre, would be a Liberal riding if all the 2011 results translated to 2015 votes, the Pollmaps study found.

But St. Paul’s, now held by long-time Liberal MP and cabinet minister Carolyn Bennett, and a Grit riding since 1993, would go to the NDP under the map.

In British Columbia, the changed political map would yield eight additional MPs for the Conservatives, two fewer for the NDP. Conservatives would also lose two ridings in Saskatchewan and one in Quebec and the gains would largely fall to the NDP.

More on thestar.com

We value respectful and thoughtful discussion. Readers are encouraged to flag comments that fail to meet the standards outlined in our
Community Code of Conduct.
For further information, including our legal guidelines, please see our full website
Terms and Conditions.